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Feb 15, 201180As conceptually and contextually bold as Let England Shake is, it features some of Harvey's softest-sounding music.
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Feb 15, 201170Let England Shake is a rewarding and staunchly uncompromising piece of art from a master songwriter who remains as relevant as ever. If it all feels a bit foreign or new, it's because Harvey, as always, refuses to repeat herself.
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Feb 15, 201188On Let England Shake, Harvey is not often upfront or forceful; her lyrics, though, are as disturbing as ever.
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Feb 15, 2011100Her state-of-the-nation address. Stunning. [Feb. 2011, p. 112]
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Feb 15, 201180Let England Shake is the sound of someone as maddened as they are enthralled, aglow with anger and passion.
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Apr 6, 201180Of all her many guises [...] this may be her most powerful. [Feb. 2011, p. 94]
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Feb 15, 201160Always an underrated guitarist, Harvey makes use of the jaunty rhythms of British folk music, but takes no comfort in the past. And you don't have to care about English history--or England in general--to fall under Harvey's spell.
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Feb 17, 201191The muted atmosphere shouldn't fool anyone, though; Shake is an album so roiling with poetic indignation, all it can reasonably do is steam.
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Feb 14, 201190Sung with warmth, these tracks offer a welcome antidote to her more familiar performance mode--spectacular austerity. They're as bloody and forceful as the battles Harvey references.
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Feb 15, 2011100Let England Shake is an album that only the Polly Harvey of today could have written.
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Feb 25, 201180If there's an underlying motif that guides Let England Shake, it's one of being utterly enraged with the seemingly endless cycle of war and violence, while simultaneously being captivated by the mythology of one's home nation.
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Feb 14, 2011100Harvey uses the bright grooves to present her grim thoughts on the world's armed conflicts. It's a hoedown for the end of civilization.
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Feb 10, 201190It is a record marked by a weary wonder at the departure of something huge from the world – Victorian invention and enterprise, the ages of steam and discovery, the impossible cruelty of empire, all fading into a half-remembered dream.
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Feb 15, 201190Let England Shake, Harvey's first solo album since 2007's White Chalk, is a brutal, often difficult and always unflinching look at what terrible things happen to people when nations fight each other.
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Feb 10, 2011100You're left with a richly inventive album that's unlike anything else in Harvey's back catalogue.
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Feb 15, 201185Harvey's singing delivers the material by juggling unwieldy emotions with care and empathy. And she makes the experience sound natural -- like a true no-brainer.
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Feb 18, 201170While albums like Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and To Bring You My Love found her looking inward--Let England Shake sees her peeking beyond her inner observations into the complicated web of English politics.
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Feb 15, 201160If she wanted to move or enlighten, Let England Shake falls short.
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Feb 15, 201190Let England Shake borrows precepts from all over the singer's canon, specifically extrapolating the piano-based concepts of White Chalk into louder, fuller renderings.
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Feb 14, 201190God bless unique, unfathomable, great Queen Polly.
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Feb 24, 201185Where the album really excels is in how it marries slightly absurd melodies to its lyrics to create a portrait of surreality and madness, as was so often rendered by those same Modernist poets Harvey cites as an influence.
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Mar 23, 201178PJ Harvey always explodes possibility when she shreds convention and tradition. Thankfully, she does just that on this Anglo-centric head-trip.
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Feb 18, 2011100This is the best album for 2011, and not just the last two months.
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Feb 15, 201160Perhaps it's no surprise that eighth album Let England Shake is the first for which Harvey does not appear on the sleeve.
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Feb 15, 2011100Let England Shake may be Harvey's less vainglorious manifestation, but it is also her most intoxicating. Rather than exposing a personal voice, she exercises her political inquietudes with studied intellectualism.
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Feb 25, 201190Her latest album marks yet another sea change, a clanging, clamoring work of art that's as disturbing as it is moving. Let England Shake is staggering, from its seasick melodies to its visceral imagery of soldiers falling like "lumps of meat."
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Feb 15, 201170Ms. Harvey's vocals rise out of a kind of bleary skiffle, with the strumming of Autoharp or distorted electric guitar above rudimentary drumbeats.
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Mar 3, 201167For all its dissent, Let England Shake is a fairly muted album, yet it demonstrates where PJ Harvey is now: more chronicler than provocateur.
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Feb 15, 2011100The double in the room on Let England Shake is the whole modern world. PJ Harvey has given us a righteous scare.
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Feb 16, 2011100Amid the carnage and the stink of loss, PJ Harvey creates inspiring beauty.
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Feb 16, 201180This is war poetry at its finest and will keep you coming back for many repeat listens. Its influence on any listener, impressionable or otherwise, should be a positive one.
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Apr 28, 201160It feels crudely stitched together. [Mar 2011, p.49]
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Mar 23, 201190A dimly lit, lo-fi hybrid, Shake takes its cue from some of Harvey's most successful past works, but has its own uniquely brash textures.
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Feb 15, 201190this time, she has found a middle ground therein, an appropriately murky backdrop as she channels another of her early inspirations: Bob Dylan. Like vintage Bob, Shake pores over history's indignities with a fine-toothed comb.
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Feb 14, 201180Authoritatively potent, bitterly bleak and beautiful, this record is an unexpected but essential punch in the face.
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Feb 16, 201180On what may be her best album, Polly Harvey offers a portrait of her homeland as a country built on bloodshed and battle, not so much a police state as a nation in thrall to military endeavour, however impotent and wasteful that has become.
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Feb 15, 201180It's an album about what war does to the aggressor, as much as what it does to the vanquished victim.
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Mar 4, 201182While the sound is looser with strummed acoustic guitar, sax, autoharp and brushed drums, it contrasts sharply with Harvey's thematic adherence to war, guns, bloodshed and bleak landscapes.
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Feb 17, 201190Since PJ Harvey is a veteran artist who, in her 20-year career, has yet to either make a bad record or repeat herself, to call her latest, Let England Shake, one of her strongest efforts to date is a bold statement, but it's true--this a brilliant record by an artist impervious to aging.
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Feb 15, 2011100For all its despair at the cost of war, this is not a protest record, rather a consideration of our place in the greater scheme of things.
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Feb 15, 201163Harvey doesn't preach, she merely describes, the lilting voice and the light melodies creating a surreal backdrop for mayhem.
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May 6, 201183Creating a suite of well-turned if unnecessarily understated antiwar songs, she's a gifted, strong-willed minor artist bent on shaking England in particular.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 42 out of 44
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Mixed: 0 out of 44
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Negative: 2 out of 44
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10This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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